My Glamorous Life

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During the week, when there are no shows going on, actors and most of the crew return to their regularly scheduled lives. Do you know what costumers do?
Laundry.
That is my incredibly glamourous life…

That’s just all the neck action, hankies, and socks for 1776 (now to be known as, “That show with too many men in it”.
The problem I keep running in to is that these fellows are all wearing rather a lot of stage makeup, but they also all wear jabots (aka, “neck action”). They keep getting makeup on their festive little neck thingsies, and then they come to me all distraught about it and ask if I can fix it (less than an hour before curtain, mind) or if I have a new bit of neck action that they can have instead. I made almost all of these. I barely had time to make what I needed, so I don’t really have a pile of spares lying about. Silly boys. So I say very sensible things at then, like “no” and “stop putting makeup under your chin” and “your costumer doesn’t even wear makeup. I’m not terribly adept at getting it out of clothes.” Then I lie and assure them it will never show under the lights. ;)
But after two weeks of shows, things were getting grim. (And by grim, I mean flesh tone.) So I went to the hardware store, and found this stuff:

I was going to use engine degreaser on them, but I wasn’t sure what that would do to the cloth. Tee…. This is slightly less dramatic, but it worked. Mostly. There were some major offenders, but at least things are back to being generally white. I suppose if I were a better costumer, I’d retreat the bad ones.